I have a weird problem that I don't even know where to begin diagnosing. Trying to install Ubuntu to a VM locks up the host system!
My setup is:
- Dell R715 server, dual 16 core AMD opteron processors, 96GB RAM
- Dell MD3600f SAN
- Server 2008 R2 Datacenter
- System Center VMM 2012
There are 5 windows virtual machines running that have had no problems. This is the first linux VM I've tried to create. I setup a VM through virtual machine manager, set the CD drive to a Ubuntu 12.04 server x64 iso, and started it up.
It boots up the normal ubuntu install menu, but the second I hit enter on "Install Ubuntu Server", I get disconnected.
The HOST machine stops responding to pings. So do all virtual machines on it. It locks up entirely – keyboard on the host won't work, mouse won't move, numlock light won't change.
There's no blue screen – the host is sitting at the login screen completely unresponsive. I can't find any relevant logs in event viewer after rebooting.
What could cause the host machine to freeze like that?
It's not a one time occurrence – it happens every time at the exact same point. Thank god this server isn't in production yet!
Update:
It doesn't seem to be a hardware problem. I fired up a dozen extra virtual machines to see if I was maybe hitting a bad spot of RAM, but everything worked fine.
Ubuntu 10.04 installed with no issues.
When doing a do-release-upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04, it got part way through the upgrade before it threw the root filesystem into read only mode and started getting tons of IO errors. Not a disk issue since I was able to run hard drive benchmarks and read/write large files before I started the upgrade.
Next things to test are 12.04 alternate CD, and 12.04 32bit and see if they show the same behavior.
Update 2
Well now this is fun…it was consistently freezing on Thursday and Friday, at least 20 times in the same spot. Nothing changed over the weekend. I'm the only one who has access to the server at the moment. And today I can boot that ISO just fine without any crashes.
I hate problems that go away on their own. I was hoping to narrow it down so I could at least know what not to do when it goes into production.
Best Answer
When you say Windows Updates are installed, are you referring to the Windows Update applet, or did you check for the Hyper-V hotfixes on the Microsoft web site? Here are a few:
2550569 - 0x20001 Stop error when you start a Linux VM in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2550569
2517329 - Performance decreases in Windows Server 2008 R2 when the Hyper-V role is installed on a computer that uses Intel Westmere or Sandy Bridge processors
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2517329
2636573 - FIX The guest operating system may crash when you perform a live migration of Hyper-V vm in Windows Server 2008 R2
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2636573
2263829 - The network connection of a running Hyper-V virtual machine may be lost under heavy outgoing network traffic on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2263829
AMD-specific:
2568088 - Virtual machine does not start on a computer that has an AMD CPU that supports the AVX feature and that is running Windows Server 2008 R2
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2568088